Year: 2017

Only 12 sleeps to go, apparently! (My brother-in-law does a daily count-down on Facebook so there’s no getting away from it!)

We will be helping out with your last minute Christmas shopping by opening the shop at the studio on Christmas Eve Eve (Saturday 23rd) from 2 pm till 7 pm for those last-minute, one-of-a-kind, hand-made gifts that you just can’t get in the big stores.

There may be mince pies and mulled wine.

In other news, we have been working hard in the background on both the studio and the website (this is our excuse for the appalling lack of blog posts, although we did manage to slip in a wee motorhome holiday too).

In the studio we have new exterior doors (so no more draughts), new interior walls (so we can heat smaller spaces in the studio easier), we are currently working on a pretty new fireplace in the shop for displays and rumour has it there may even be a wood stove on the way! Also, very soon we will have a loo (albeit without running water and drainage for now, so technically just a small room at the back of hut where the loo will eventually be situated. But it will have walls and a door, so that’s something.

We are also now launching into a major making bonanza to get the shop and web shop stocked up for the New Year. Also in the shop, we have a snazzy new credit card processing and point-of-sale system that will make checkout faster, and help us keep control of our stock levels.

On the website front, we have been making all the necessary preparations to set up our online shop. From the techy WordPress self-hosted site with Woocommerce selling platform, we are able to host all of our own online selling. We had the first of a couple of sessions of product photography this week, and once we write up all the descriptions, we will have everything in stock up on the web for your shopping convenience.

We will keep our Etsy store for now, but everything you can get there, you’ll be able to find on here too. Soon. 🙂

(GeekSpeak Alert!) Woocommerce has lots of bells and whistles, including the fantastic ability to connect up our online stock levels to what’s actually IN the shop, so we’ll have a proper grown-up joined-up selling system. On top of that, I’ve just worked out tonight that I can send all our sales info from the web AND the shop direct to our accounts system. Which is great, as I’m no longer working as a bookkeeper and want to minimise what we are doing in our own business to give me more time and head-space to create, without upsetting the tax man! (End of GeekSpeak)

So, there we are. We have been quiet, but with good reason. We hope you can come along on Christmas Eve Eve for our last-minute shopping night. If not*, we would like to wish you and your families a very merry Christmas and all the very best for 2018.

*This doesn’t mean this is the last blog post of the year, but given our track record, I’m covering our bases!

We are very fortunate to have our studio in one of the Nissen huts at Cultybraggan Camp in Comrie, Perthshire. We are now regularly making and selling hand-built pottery huts and a percentage of the profits are donated to the Comrie Development Trust, to fund further development of the visitor attraction within the camp, and towards the running of guided tours and open day events by the Heritage Group throughout the year.

Here’s a sneak peek of the first huts drying in preparation for their first firing.

The big one in the first picture is for a special project coming up, but I may make more as money boxes too.

The wee ones look so cute all lined up in rows (just like in the camp) and I am really looking forward to having them all glazed and fired so I can play with -errrmmm – sell them to raise some cash for this fab group who do so much.

We had a fantastic day on Sunday at our Blooming Great Tea Party in aid of Marie Curie, and raised a whopping £230 for the charity. What a great way to kick off the next 12 months of fundraising for this wonderful organisation.